Tunisia rises from the Arab Spring’s ashes

Four years after street trader Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself to death in protest at police harassment and ignited a wave of revolutions across the Middle East, it’s only in his country — Tunisia — that any kind of stable reform has taken root.

Most of the other countries of the Middle East caught up in the Arab Spring rebellions inspired by Bouazizi’s suicide are in the grip of seemingly interminable civil wars. Egypt — after a brief experiment with democracy produced a hard-line Islamist administration — has returned to thinly-disguised military rule. But the hope that the return of the soldiers would bring stability has proved false. There have been months of low-level street violence in support of the ousted Islamists. Today, two protesters and three military personnel were killed in scattered incidents in Cairo.

Syria is in the grip of a three-sided civil war. The country has been effectively partitioned into areas held by the government of President Bashar Assad, the mainstream rebels of the Syrian National Coalition, and the rabid jihadists of the Islamic State group. But despite intervention with warplanes by the United States and its allies against Islamic State, not one of the three players in this war is likely to become strong enough for an outright victory in the foreseeable future.

The situation is even more chaotic in Libya, where the dethroning and killing of leader Moammar Gadhafi removed the only authority that made the country a coherent state. The melee of tribal, religious and political skirmishing has produced two main groups. There is the ‘Dignity’ bloc led by retired General Khalifa Haftar and fighters from the town of Zintan. Opposed to them is the ‘Libya Dawn’ group, made up of militant Islamists mainly from Benghazi and the town of Misrata.

The two groups are fighting over control of the capital, Tripoli, with the result that the General National Congress, elected in deeply flawed elections in June that the Supreme Court has declared invalid, meets in Tobruk. There is no sign of any sensible outcome to this mess.

Almost nowhere are there signs of leaders attempting to counteract the appeal of the Muslim fundamentalists by introducing gradual, progressive political reform. The exception is Tunisia.

In Yemen, the long, drawn-out violent campaign to remove President Ali Abdallah Saleh finally saw the appointment of a new government two weeks ago. But the chances of this administration being able to forge any kind of national consensus are slim to none. In the south, separatists have set Sunday, November 30 as the deadline for creation of their own state. In the north, the Shiite Muslim minority, with the backing of Iran, is either being persecuted by the Sunni majority, or seeking revenge for persecution.

The main tormentors of the Shiites are al-Qaida-linked fighters, who receive backing from neighbouring Saudi Arabia. But these al Qaida followers are moving more and more towards the Islamic State group, with all that implies for the barbaric treatment of anyone they consider a religious heretic. That’s not a recipe for social harmony.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the response to the Arab Spring has been more efficient authoritarianism — driven by the fear that any weakness will only open the door to the Islamists.Almost nowhere are there signs of leaders attempting to counteract the appeal of the Muslim fundamentalists by introducing gradual, progressive political reform.

The exception is Tunisia, where it all started with Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010. Less than a month later after persistent street protests, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in power since 1987, crammed his extended family into a plane and fled to Saudi Arabia. He is now housed in the apartment block in Jeddah that the Riyadh government reserves for exiled despots. (Previous tenants include Uganda’s Idi Amin.)

At first there were fears that Tunisia would go the way of Egypt and be taken over by Islamists intent on imposing a theocratic state governed by religious law. The Islamist Ennahda party dominated post-revolution elections, but was unseated in October parliamentary elections by the secular Nidaa Tounes party. And on November 23, the Nidaa Tounes candidate, Beji Caid Essebsi, came first in the presidential elections with nearly 40 per cent of the vote. A close second with 33.4 per cent of the vote was interim President Moncef Marzouki, a doctor, human rights activist and staunch political opponent of the Ben Ali regime.

A run-off election is scheduled for December 28 and both leading contenders are scurrying around seeking support from the minor parties. But a hopeful sign that the niceties of democracy are taking route is that Marzouki has asked Nidaa Tounes, as the largest party in parliament, to form a government, even though it is his opponent in the presidential race.

No transition to democracy is ever smooth and relapses followed by further struggles are the norm. Tunisia will be no exception. There is still going to have to be considerable coalition-building if Tunisia is going to emerge with a presidency that has a functional relationship with the parliament. The Islamist Ennahda, for example, has 69 seats in parliament against the governing Nidaa Tounes’ 85.

But as one surveys the rubble and dismembered societies left by the tempests of the Arab Spring, Tunisia stands out as the only place where the upheaval left behind the prospect of real reform.

Jonathan Manthorpe has been a foreign correspondent and international affairs columnist for nearly 40 years. He was European bureau chief for the Toronto Star and then Southam News in the late 1970s and the 1980s. In 1989 he was appointed Africa correspondent by Southam News and in 1993 was posted to Hong Kong to cover Asia. For the last few years he has been based in Vancouver, writing international affairs columns for what is now the Postmedia Group. He left the group last year and now writes for a range of newspapers and websites. [email protected]

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